Idaho pioneer cabin moved to Chesterfield site

CHESTERFIELD, Idaho -- A cabin once occupied by a 19th century American Indian woman who was a beloved midwife and healer to southeastern Idaho farmers and ranchers has been moved to the Chesterfield ghost town.

For more than 120 years, Aunt Ruth Call Davids' cabin had been just over a small hill from the town site, which is owned by the Chesterfield Foundation.

The group helps keep watch on about 27 buildings in this historic Oregon Trail town between Lava Hot Springs and Soda Springs in the Portneuf River Valley, including an amusement hall, a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints tithing office and a store that still operates, selling only products its proprietors say existed before 1916.

Last summer, volunteers and members of Davids' surviving family dug a foundation and filled it with cement and lava rocks. The cabin was then dismantled log-by-log and reassembled in Chesterfield. Vernon Austin, a resident of nearby Blackfoot and expert in log-cabin restoration, worked to make sure it was rebuilt as true as possible to its original configuration.

Come 2009, workers hope to begin laying the floor and working on the interior of the cabin.

"Chesterfield is a magical place," said Chris Knox, a foundation member who says she wanted to honor Ruth Call Davids' legacy as an American Indian woman who settled into the largely white community that dominated the region's early Mormon settlements.

"She was a great person," Knox said. "I thought it would be neat to tell her story from her cabin."

According to the 1996 Mormon publication "Our Pioneer Heritage," a Fillmore, Utah, resident named Anson Call in 1851 traded a small supply of flour for a little Piede Indian girl he named Ruth. On Christmas Day 1863, she married James Henry Davids, a young soldier who had served in the U.S. Army unit that had been dispatched in the late-1850s to quell a Mormon uprising in Utah. He later converted to the religion.

The Call and Davids families moved in the early 1880s to Chesterfield, where Ruth Call Davids developed a reputation for her use of herbal and natural remedies and delivered most of the babies in the community. According to the 1996 Mormon history, a doctor in nearby Soda Springs named Kackley said, "In case of pneumonia and the caring of babies, Aunt Ruth is as good as any doctor."

Davids died in 1919 and is buried in Chesterfield.
-- The Associated Press